Higher attrition rate with women after getting married is often because of the lack of options for child care or options for maternity leave. At MSD we provide both child care options as well as maternity / paternity leave. The question of child care does not just pertain to the mother and maternity leave, it also matters to the father. Obviously this is entirely new to most Indians! But we had our senior DevOps engineer take paternity leave on the first month of his job for the entire month. We contn to accommodate working from home where possible for him and timings as well. We can afford to, because at the end of the day we’re building towards a long term vision and a company that’s here to stay. Jeopardising the health and wellness of your employees in the short run and focusing on deadlines alone is hardly a way to run an organization, even it is a startup. Plus since we’re highly interdisciplinary and have min. of 2 people with similar skills on multiple projects, we’ve designed teams to step in and fill in for each other where necessary. We balance the nature of work between customer deadlines and core technology development. Often times it’s a pull and push there but it allows us to get through periods where there might be moving in and out of employees in short bursts. The best thing that comes out of this though, will hopefully be keeping attrition rates low while building a trusting family of people that want to work together. Lastly, I make it a point to mix children, work, pets etc at our office, setting the tone — that we care. Only time will tell if this works or not. I’ll certainly write back a year or two later reflecting on this. There are many other reasons beyond child care as well in India but then again, there are also lots of women I know who don’t stop work after getting married or having kids.